Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know®

In short, avoiding the worst climate

impacts means global economic growth of some 2.24% a year rather than 2.30%.

“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering,

would burn all of our known fossil fuel reserves, since that would mean warming beyond 6°C (11°F) and an irreversibly ruined climate that would have trouble sustaining 1 billion people. It would also mean that (1) the Earth ends up with very large areas that are uninhabitable or unfarmable and (2) the ocean would suffer a mass extinction, with larg

reflectors or mirrors in outer space. However, “the Committee has chosen to not consider these technologies because of the substantial time (>20 years), cost (trillions of dollars), and technology challenges associated with these issues.

The cap-and-trade system is designed to achieve a comparable target level of overall economy-wide emissions reductions as the other pollution-reduction strategies while (1) rewarding the companies that are the most innovative or efficient at cutting pollution and (2) making certain that the target level of emissions is achieved at the least possibl

“Changed diets resulted in GHG emission savings of 34–64% compared to the ‘business-as-usual’ scenario.

The second category focuses on regulatory policies aimed at either increasing the use of clean energy or reducing the emissions of GHGs.

reductions—40%—comes from energy efficiency.” The report itself provides data “confirming energy efficiency’s place as the ‘first fuel.